discovery subsequently made of the malversations of some of the highest persons at Vienna, and which had much to do with the suicide of the Minister of Finance.  It is known, too, that the force which Napoleon III. had assembled in the Adriatic was very strong, and could have been so used as to have promoted an Hungarian insurrection in a sense not at all pleasant to the Austrians, to have attacked Dalmatia and Istria, and to have aided in the deliverance of Venice.  That force was largely naval in its character, and the French navy was burning to distinguish itself in a war that had been so productive of glory to the sister-service:  it would have had a Magenta and a Palestro of its own, won where the Dorias and the Pisani had struggled for fame and their countries’ ascendency.  Instead of the Quadrilateral being a bar to the French, it would have been a trap to the Austrians, who would have been taken there after the manner in which Napoleon I. took their predecessors at Ulm.  After the war was over, it came out that Verona was not even half armed.

If Napoleon III. was bent upon carrying that imitation of his uncle, of which he is so fond, to the extent of granting a magnanimous peace to a crushed foe, he may be said to have caricatured that which he sought to imitate.  The first Napoleon’s magnanimity after Austerlitz has been attributed to the craft of the beaten party,—­he allowing the Russians to escape when they had extricated themselves from the false position in which their master’s folly had caused them to be placed.  But the third Napoleon did allow the Austrians to avoid the consequences of their defeat, and so disappointed Italy and the world.  He was magnanimous, and most astonishing to the minds of men was his magnanimity.  Most people called it stupidity, and strange stories were told of his nervous system having been shattered by the sights and sounds of those slaughter-fields which he had planned and fought and won!

We live rapidly in this age, when nations are breaking up all around us, when unions are dissolving, when dynasties disappear before the light like ghosts at cock-crowing, and when emperors and kings rely upon universal suffrage, once so terrible a bugbear in their eyes, for the titles to their crowns.  Opinion is rapidly formed, and is as rapidly dismissed.  We may be as much astonished now at the peace of Villafranca as we were on the day when first it was announced, and while looking upon it only as a piece of diplomacy intended to put an end to a contest costly in blood and gold; but we cannot say, as it was common then to say, that the war which it closed has decided nothing.  That war established the freedom and nationality of Italy, and the peace so much condemned was the means of demonstrating to the world the existence of an Italian People.  How far the French Emperor was self-deceived, and to what extent he believed in the practicability of the arrangements made at Villafranca and Zurich, are inscrutable mysteries.